Surender Baswana

Surender Baswana is a Professor and Tapas Mishra Memorial Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur. His research focuses on the design and analysis of computer algorithms, with specializations in graph algorithms, dynamic algorithms, fault-tolerant structures, and randomized algorithms. He holds a PhD (2005), M.Tech. (1999), and B.Tech. (1997) from IIT Delhi.

Research Interests: His work spans fundamental algorithmic domains including minimum cuts (with recent breakthroughs in Steiner mincuts), fault-tolerant data structures (handling edge failures in DFS trees and mincuts), dynamic graph algorithms (efficient updates for DFS and matching), and approximate shortest paths. He develops theoretically optimal solutions with applications in network reliability and optimization.

Awards and Honors:

• Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2018)
• Wagner Prize Finalist for Operations Research (2018)
• IIT Kanpur Distinguished Teacher Award (2017)
• Young Engineer Award (2009)
• Best Faculty Award (8-time recipient)
• PhD Dissertation Award (IBM, 2005)

PhD Supervision: Mentored 5+ PhD students including ACM India Dissertation Award recipient Keerti Choudhary and Manas Mandal Award winner Koustav Bhanja, now faculty at IIT Delhi and Weizmann Institute postdoc respectively.

Professional Journey: From software engineer at Lucent Technologies (1999), he transitioned to academia via postdoctoral research at Max Planck Institute (2003-2006), rising through ranks at IIT Kanpur from Assistant Professor (2006) to Professor (2016-present).